Nicholas Katzenbach Dies: Lawyer Shaped Civil Rights Policy In 1960s

TRENTON, N.J. — While researching his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro found himself again and again calling upon Nicholas Katzenbach, the former Justice Department and State Department official.

“He was a key figure in so many of the most crucial moments in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations,” Caro said.

The Bay of Pigs. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Integration of schools. The Warren Report. The Civil Rights Act. Vietnam. In some ways, the history of Katzenbach's time in government was a history of government in the 1960s.

Katzenbach died Tuesday night at age 90 at his home in Skillman, N.J.

Katzenbach was in his early 40s when he joined the Justice Department in 1961 under Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Katzenbach wrote a legal brief in support of President John F. Kennedy's decision to blockade Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis and helped secure the release of prisoners captured during the disastrous Bay of Pigs raid on Cuba in 1961.

He became a deputy attorney general in 1963 and, after Kennedy's assassination, served as attorney general and an undersecretary of state under President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Katzenbach, who helped Johnson pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was the Kennedy administration's point man when James Meredith became the first black to enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1962. The following year, he was the federal official on hand when segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace made his infamous “stand in the schoolhouse door,” symbolically attempting to block two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from entering the University of Alabama.

On Nov. 25, 1963, three days after the Kennedy assassination, Katzenbach sent a memo to Johnson aide Bill Moyers urging that results of the FBI's investigation be made public to combat any notion that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone.

“The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large,” Katzenbach wrote.

Four days after the memo, Johnson appointed the Warren Commission, which ultimately concluded Oswald acted alone, a theory still disputed. Conspiracy theorists often cite Katzenbach's memo as a sign of a government cover-up.